


What Does Homestuck Believe In?

by Laurasauras



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Essays, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:07:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22158313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurasauras/pseuds/Laurasauras
Summary: An examination of the themes of Homestuck.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	What Does Homestuck Believe In?

**Author's Note:**

> I was asked this on Tumblr and don't trust that website not to eat my posts, so I'm backing it up here! I've edited the post to make the language less casual and add punctuation because my tone on Tumblr isn't quite essay-style.

Homestuck believes in love, hope, and fighting even when the stakes seem insurmountable.

Firstly: love. And more specifically, all love, not just romantic. There are romantic parts of Homestuck, and they’re often show-stopping.

(While we're looking at these images, Homestuck does visual callbacks very well, there’s a reason that these two scenes are composed the same way.)

But the core of the story is these four kids, all of them starting from a state of isolation. They don’t have “real friends”, they feel disconnected from their guardians, they feel disconnected from everyone in the world they walk around in, but they go online and they have each other. And they’re constantly joking and making fun of each other, but they’re also checking in almost every time they achieve something, as if grounding their friends in their real life.

The story keeps progressing and getting more and more complicated, but it can never quite overshadow the beauty of the dumb pesterlog conversations between friends or the love they unabashedly show each other, even though it's not really "cool" for teenagers to do that.

I think that’s a large part of what the audience of Homestuck connects with—that feeling of connection online and the support that the characters give each other. 

I also think that a lot of the time, the friendships and familial relationships in Homestuck are given the same—if not more—importance as the romantic relationships, which is really uncommon to see in media! Almost every character has to come to terms with how their upbringing shaped them, and really, that’s the same of almost every person.

The conversation between Dirk and Dave before the final battle is one of the most important and touching moments of the whole story. Two of the characters most concerned with their adherence to masculinity and appearing "too cool for emotions" talk about their feelings and trauma before hugging it out. It doesn’t further the plot, it isn’t part of the hero’s romantic arc, but it’s vital. 

The second big thing Homestuck believes in is the importance of doing what is right and in being a hero.

Homestuck positions John and his friends as the main characters selected by the universe to play Sburb and then literally ascends them to god status.

They’re empowered by destiny! They’re going to beat the game, conquer the worst villain ever, bring humanity and trollkind back from extinction _and_ their new world isn’t going to be under the tyranny of a genocidal fish alien!

But that empowerment is also a disempowerment. 

Look at how frequently Dave falls into the reluctant hero trope. Fate kicks these kids around. When they are so destined to do all that stuff, can they really be said to have free will? And when they do seem to make a wrong choice in relation to their destiny, it’s either something that furthers the plot _or_ it creates a doomed timeline and they’re usually killed horribly. 

And Homestuck is a story that is constantly reminding us that it’s a story. You can definitely lose yourself in Homestuck, you can zone into it and accept the rules and just read it as if it’s a reasonable reality, but I don’t think it was ever written that way, or when it is, I think that that’s a result of Hussie accidentally getting into the story as well.

Homestuck opens with this:

That’s not a logical world and it's not designed to be one. He’s 13 and he doesn’t have a name? But of course he has a name prior to this moment, it’s just a cool Homestuck thing we don't have to think about. Because we never get a conversation that goes:

TG: so the big 13   
TG: you get a name yet   
EB: yup! let me formally introduce myself as john!   
TG: i give that name 4/5 hats

No, Dave just immediately calls John by his name and addresses the present he sent in the past, "before" his naming, with John's name too. Likewise, until we’re introduced to the other characters and learn their names, they’re referred to by their handle abbreviations, but the second they’re introduced it’s first name basis time. Because Homestuck is a story and our perception is what matters most.

In Homestuck, an "intermission" doesn't mean a reprieve from the story, no matter how much it resembles that. The content in them is just as essential as the acts. And when we are given "epilogues" something I have never seen come in a plural before, they came with a "prologue", were novel length, and set up the plot to continue, not end. 

The website changes format, there are the meta jokes, there’s the way that Caliborn raises the same complaints to Hussie about the story being too long and confusing that some members of the fandom were making at the time. When a drawing of Karkat looked like he was wearing really long pants, Hussie put that into the comic. We saw drastic changes in artstyle, often because someone else was drawing a panel.

The author literally climbs into the story and we watch him type it. He might as well be saying _Don’t Forget This Is All Written By Me!_ even as he pretends obliviousness to his character's thoughts and intentions, or helplessness to the plot. 

But as much as it often feels like they do, the characters don’t have free will as they are fictional characters. But on a different level, which many writers can understand, once you as an author have established a character, you trap yourself into writing them consistently, which can mean that while something might be best for the plot, a character metaphorically crosses their arms in your head and says, “I would literally never do that.”

Some characters of Homestuck become aware that they are just characters in a story, and we know they are, but most of them don’t think that, they think that they’re just living the life they have.

How on Earth are his characters supposed to go about their days when their author finds it funny to block their path with a giant bust of Snoop Dogg? When they work for pages and pages and pages to get around whatever asinine thing Hussie (or worse, his fans!) has come up with and there’s always another obstacle and maybe there’s not even a point anyway! How do you not just dismiss it as something like “hes just being weird/an asshole/etc”?

He might just be having a laugh. But so to might God or the universe or whoever it is that is driving our reality. 

Think about why detective stories are so popular. They give the illusion that if you’re clever enough, if you collect the right data and link it together, you can trace back exactly what happened and solve impossible riddles and make sense of the world. You meet a man who has dust on his knees and you can deduce that he’s been sneaking down to the basement of the shop he works at to tunnel into the bank next door. There’s nothing magic about it, Watson, it’s just good detective work.

And we need that lie! But you know how it works in the real world? In the real world, police are baffled at a crime scene until a decade later someone discovers the fingerprints [belonged to a KOALA!](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techly.com.au%2F2015%2F09%2F11%2Fkoalas-fingerprints-much-like-human-theyve-tricked-csis%2F&t=Yjg5OTkzODM5ODQzZTUwODA4ZTA5ODBmNjMzZGM4ODg1YmE1NGRhNixiUllsYUw2RA%3D%3D&b=t%3AwSYFUFwfRquyrUWdq9QGxw&p=https%3A%2F%2Flaurasauras.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187564390812%2Fwhat-do-you-think-homestuck-believes-in&m=1) That’s more ridiculous than a Snoop Dogg bust in a hallway, or many of the other things Hussie has written.

This, to me, is a huge message behind the epilogues too, because John figures out he’s in a story in Candy and everything feels pointless. But if that’s the world he lives in, that’s the world he fucking lives in. And there’s nothing pointless about living, even if you're not in direct control of your destiny.

I think that clicks for him towards the end when he talks to Roxy and then Rose. Rose actually thanks him for choosing a path that allowed her to have the life she had, because she loves her wife and daughter. She acknowledges it’s insane, but she’s happy, that’s the life she lived and she doesn’t want a more sensible one. The fact that we see two back to back conversations about this means it's important, it's being underlined.

So, what happens to us when we get that feeling like our world is pointless? 

(Which is a major side effect of depression by the way, and I still stand by my interpretation that _all_ of John’s feelings can be put down to his depression instead of being a helpless puppet of canon, which is what makes the fact that it's probably both interesting.)

For a generation with terrifying levels of mental illness, when we start feeling like the world is too crazy and the odds are too high, and there’s this unspoken war happening and our friends aren’t even guaranteed to be on our side?

We just fucking fight anyway.

Because we live in the world we live in and we just have to be grateful that we are who we are because of that.

Every character in Homestuck chooses this, again and again, so I have to read that as hopeful. Alpha Dave and Rose know who Her Imperial Condescension is and that their kids will arrive long after the apocalypse and they still fight, and fight _loudly_ even though they know it won’t change things. (On top of the White House, in case the political allegory was too subtle.) 

There are so many messages in Homestuck and honestly I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of them. But what does Homestuck believe in? I feel that in my heart. Homestuck believes in love and in doing what is right, even when it’s hard to figure out what right is, even when you might not make a difference. 

Homestuck is good, actually.


End file.
